Olafur Eliasson
Take your time
April 20 – June 30, 2008
On view at The Museum of Modern Art &
P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center
MoMA AND P.S.1 PRESENT THE MAJOR SURVEY TAKE YOUR TIME: OLAFUR ELIASSON
The Museum of Modern Art and P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center present Take your time: Olafur Eliasson, the first comprehensive survey in the United States to explore the highly experimental work of Olafur Eliasson, whose large-scale immersive environments and installations elegantly recreate the extremes of landscape and atmosphere in his native Iceland. In his work, Eliasson recontextualizes elements such as light, water, ice, fog, stone, and moss to create unique situations that shift the viewer’s perception of place and self. By transforming the galleries into hybrid spaces of nature and culture, Eliasson prompts an intensive engagement with the world and offers a fresh consideration of everyday life.
The exhibition’s 38 works include 14 of those featured in the originating exhibition first presented at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art as well as 24 additional works, six of which were uniquely designed for this exhibition. Drawing from public and private collections worldwide, the exhibition will be on view at MoMA and P.S.1. from April 20 through June 30, 2008.
The exhibition is organized by Madeleine Grynsztejn, former Elise S. Haas Senior Curator of Painting and Sculpture at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), where the exhibition originated. In New York, it is coordinated and expanded by Roxana Marcoci, Curator, Department of Photography; and Klaus Biesenbach, Chief Curator, Department of Media, The Museum of Modern Art.
Probing the cognitive aspects of what it means to see, Eliasson creates complex optical phenomena using simple, makeshift technical devices: Colored bulbs bathe a room in yellow light, turning everything inside monochrome; strobes illuminate a thin curtain of falling water, causing the eye to “freeze” the droplets in midair; kaleidoscopes produce colorful prismatic effects; mirrors reflect spotlight beams, revealing an artificial dimension. By making visible the mechanics of his works and laying bare the artifice of the illusion, Eliasson points to the elliptical relationship between reality, perception, and representation.
Inspired by the meteorology and terrain of his native Scandinavia, Eliasson often recontextualizes natural phenomena, as exemplified by his wall of reindeer moss at MoMA and indoor rainbow and upward-flowing waterfall at P.S.1. In his works these sights appear natural, yet invariably they are artificially induced. Even as his work fosters wonder, it also emphasizes the ways in which cultural institutions mediate our perception of natural phenomena.
The monumental new installation Take your time (2008), one of the six new works Eliasson created for the New York presentation, takes its name from the exhibition’s title. A circular mirror, 40 feet in diameter and weighing 600 pounds, is mounted to the ceiling of P.S.1’s largest gallery at an angle and rotates at one revolution per minute, destabilizing viewers’ perception of space as they pass underneath it.
Eliasson presents perception as it is lived in the world. Because people do not stand in front of his works as if before a picture, but rather inside them, actively engaged, his installations posit the very act of looking as a social experience. In MoMA’s Marron Atrium, for instance, an electric fan hangs from the ceiling to swing above the visitors below. The fan’s ever-changing, unpredictable arcs provide a striking metaphor for perception in motion. Eliasson engages in an ongoing exploration of subjectivity, reflection, and the fluid boundary between nature and culture, revealing the degree to which reality is constructed and helping us to reflect more critically on our experience of it.
Take your time: Olafur Eliasson was circulated by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and organized there by Madeleine Grynsztejn. At The Museum of Modern Art and P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center the exhibition was expanded, and its organization and installation were overseen by Roxana Marcoci and
Klaus Biesenbach.
Lead support was provided by Helen and Charles Schwab and the Mimi and Peter Haas Fund. Generous support was provided by the Bernard Osher Foundation, the Barbro Osher Pro Suecia Foundation, and SFMOMA’s Collectors Forum. Additional support was provided by Patricia and William Wilson III, the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, and the National Endowment for the Arts.
The New York showing is made possible by the Mimi and Peter Haas Fund.
Additional funding is provided by Jerry I. Speyer and Katherine G. Farley, Danish Ministry of Culture, and Skagen Designs.
PUBLIC PROGRAMS
The three-day symposium The Colors of the Brain, a collaboration with the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (GSAPP) of Columbia University and with Studio Olafur Eliasson, reviews and critiques contemporary cultural theories of color that have emerged from artistic and scientific practice. Programs take place at MoMA (April 18), at Columbia (April 19), and at Studio Olafur Eliasson in Berlin (May 9).
On April 22, the panel discussion Proto-Cinema: Contemporary Art and the Geometry of Motion explores how contemporary artists address the interstice between film and photography by deconstructing the mediums through various conceptual uses, and how such elements are incorporated into exhibitions.
For more information, please visit www.moma.org/thinkmodern
ONLINE PROJECT
Find images of the works in the exhibition, video interviews, interactive floor plans, background information, and images of the Olafur Eliasson Studio online with the April 20 launch of www.moma.org/olafureliasson. The site will also display pictures taken by select visitors on cell-phone cameras that will snap images at random intervals, conveying the experiential nature of the installations and the journey that visitors experience passing through them.
For press inquiries, please contact:
MoMA: Meg Blackburn, 212/708-9757 or meg_blackburn@moma.org
P.S.1: April Hunt, 718/786-3139 or april@ps1.org
THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART
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